Can’t Overwhelm The Leyonhjelm: A Response to Port Arthur Survivor Carolyn Loughton

By Dennis DeMartins

Fireworks have commenced down under as the Adler shotgun debacle continues. This week, Greens Senator Penny Wright continued to live in denial about completely losing her own Senate Inquiry and made the usual baseless accusations about a “cashed up gun lobby hijacking the debate”. (Hint: it doesn’t exist in Australia). Labor candidate Pat O’Neill decided he didn’t want to get elected next year by making a ridiculous anti-gun statement on social media, for which he was promptly destroyed. He was one-upped by Australian public policy “expert” and all around hoplophobic statist clown Simon Chapman . . .

who decided to throw his hat in the ring for dumbest anti-gun quote of the year with this effort regarding the “first mass killing with an Adler”. Former head of Gun Control Australia, Stalinist and current Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon thought she would join in the idiocy, and Queensland Police Minister Jo-Ann Miller decided she was too good to speak to visiting Canadian MP Gary Breitkreuz over firearms’ registries being abolished.

And in the midst of this Adler ban madness did you know a school in Melbourne was locked down by Police after a mass shooting threat was called in? No, because Ashley Madison was on the front page all week.

Senator David Leyonhjelm came out swinging and took to the Senate floor to call out NFWPWG Chair Catherine Smith and the recent 2005 leaked documents from her secretive organisation, the Liberal Party, the National Party, Tony Abbott and Michael Keenan for their part in the entire Adler fiasco. Leyonhjelm also made an incredibly salient point regarding the Sydney Siege Inquiry, as the aforementioned parties have been using this as primary justification for more firearms laws. However, as Leyonhjelm points out, if one actually bothers to read the report, it explicitly recommends the deregulation of firearms laws.

Leyonhjelm was joined by Senator Ricky Muir, who has an Adler on order, and called out Attorney General George Brandis. The complete incompetence of Brandis dressed up as the usual pompous arrogance was firmly on display here, with Brandis stating “The government is concerned that lever action rifles are a safety issue”. Never mind the fact that the Winchester Replica 1887 and IAC 7 shot models are still completely legal along with a slew of lever action rifles, none of which have been used in a mass shooting before. But this isn’t surprising, being George Brandis, the same moron who passed data retention laws in Australia earlier this year but was unable to explain what metadata actually is.

Late on Friday, Senator Leyonhjelm announced he will be introducing a disallowance motion into the Senate in September to completely overturn the Adler ban as opposed to the 12-month ban he was able to gain.

And now, the crescendo….

I expected the Port Arthur “stand on the graves” card to be played at some stage but not this early. This week both the ABC and Fairfax decided to double down emotively and wheeled out Port Arthur survivor Carolyn Loughton, who lost her daughter inside the Broad Arrow Cafe. Loughton obviously called for more gun control.

Although few can empathise with the level of Loughton’s personal tragedy, the language used in her statements raises some serious eyebrows.

“She stood up like Jesus on the cross, with her arms out and this look of absolute sheer terror on her face.”

Why the analogy to Jesus being crucified? If these are truly Loughton’s own words then so be it, but given the anti-gun crowd’s default position of martyrizing dead children for the sake of their own agenda, this raises a red flag that someone else may be putting words into her mouth. And if that is true, that exploitation of her tragedy is disgusting.

“He was coming up behind my daughter and he had the gun up and he was shooting people behind me”
“He fired a fatal shot into her and he was aiming at everybody’s heads.”

How would she know if Bryant was targeting people’s heads if they were behind her, especially if she spent a great deal of time on the floor protecting her child? The information about the high number of head shots came out after the shooting.  And doesn’t this call into question the long held assertion by Tasmania Police that Bryant fired the AR15 exclusively from the hip? Where exactly was the gun up? If this is true, how could she tell the muzzle was pointed towards victim’s heads at that angle? Although one could reasonably put this down to post-traumatic stress, this statement from Loughton is confusing. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it is impossible for the public to ascertain the facts of what happened at Port Arthur thanks to the 30 year coronial inquiry ban, which makes one question why didn’t Loughton use this media opportunity to call for it as so many of her fellow survivors have done?

“It really doesn’t matter how fast the gun is, or how far it fires, if you’re in a cafe it is lethal. With this particular gun, it is a high powered, high-calibre gun.”

No, it is important and this argument is completely invalid, especially as it’s the entire reason this whole fiasco over the Adler started. Bread and butter Shannon Watts/CSGV stuff that we all know.

‘Enough’. There is no debate. Enough.

This.

Again, no disrespect to Loughton’s personal tragedy, but raw emotion isn’t and never will be grounds to dismiss and silence rational and evidence based opposing views, nor is it justification for her and others to come down on everyone else who had absolutely nothing to do with it.

From all this I can personally draw two conclusions:

1)The fingerprints of Rebecca Peters, the Greens and Gun Control Australia are all over this stunt. Especially after GCA’s ridiculous victim exploitation attempt to push lies on the back of the Lalin Fernando shooting in 2014 and being caught out doing so.

2)The battle is not over, but the Australian anti-gun crowd has well and truly lost control of the anti-gun narrative and they know it. This isn’t 1996 and the irrelevancy of the mainstream media in the digital age has essentially rendered their emotive, non-factual narrative inert.

Senator Leyonhjelm is quite correct in his “being a victim doesn’t make you a social policy expert” response to Loughton. And as Dr Samara McPhedran rightly pointed out last week at an event hosted by Shooters Union, they are going all in with the emotive rhetoric.

Furthermore, the notion that the Australian media are the ones to claim moral superiority when it comes to Port Arthur is comically absurd. As we are reminded, it was both Newscorp and Fairfax who deliberately altered photos of Martin Bryant to make him appear more demonic. This also had the added effect of invalidating the witness statements and contaminating the investigation, before the “investigation” into Port Arthur had even begun.

Beware the cornered dog Aussie LAFO’s, as that is what the antis are right now down under.